Within the convention of the novel, some kind of overarching narrative voice generally sets the terms of reading. Without this, and the conventional elements of paragraphs of ‘description’, details about the thoughts and feelings (the so-called ‘inner life’) of the
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characters, back story, etc., the dramatic text may appear to some people to be lacking, to be relatively empty, to be, in a sense, full of gaps. Put together with the assumption that only performance yields significant meaning, the ‘gaps’ seem to be insurmountable, or, at best, suspended in favour of a different event: the related, but very different, artefact of performance. The overarching importance of dialogue (even in the film script) is replaced in the novel by swathes of prose. Dialogue in the novel is generally a minor element. Yet again, then, in relation to the dominant literary convention the dramatic text becomes an ‘incomplete’ piece of fiction (i.e., composed of ‘minor’ elements) with the important bits missing.
Dialogue remains in its misconceived place as lesser, secondary, unfamiliar.
Conclusions
Altogether, then, ideas about the incomplete text, seeing the written work as only one element in a collaborative process, the privileging of the physical/visual over the written and the assumptions about hermeneutical partiality as applied to the dramatic text do not exactly combine to shape an identifiable object which the dramatist produces – and which can be subject to some kind of literary autonomy and, therefore, susceptible to productive pedagogic treatment, let alone performance.
Ironically, while the published, performed and/or canonical (live or dead) dramatist is privileged, as a working writer she/he is theoretically diminished. The provenance of the writer’s professional practice is represented as incomplete, partial, secondary, relatively unimportant. The Death of the Author is far more than a sophisticated postmodern conceit; the phrase encapsulates with painful poignancy the way dramatists and the dramatic text are generally approached, both by the cultural industries and in many of today’s most influential forms of academic theatre studies.
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Drama – the apparently incomplete text 25
Performance, reception theory and semiology, different ways of understanding the signifying process of dramatic production, developed in part as a reaction against the historical convention of studying plays-on-the-page. This academic over-compensation has helped construct a tacit definition of the role of the dramatist as someone who necessarily writes an incomplete text.
Performance theory, interesting and important as it always is, is also inherently unstable and provisional, especially in relation to theatre. No one performance is ever absolutely identical to any other, and each production is necessarily distinctive and unrepeatable. There is never a fixed performance ‘object’, which can be reliably identified – compared, for example, to a book, although here too there will be different editions of texts, sometimes with changes incorporated. This is borne out by academic attitudes to writing drama. As Susan Bennett pointed out in writing about audience-reception theory, ‘The usefulness of a discourse which took account of receptive processes was undercut by its neglect of the dramatic text and performance.’9
The analytically useful distinctions between ‘dramatic text’ and
‘performance text’ have led to new forms of study, analysis and understanding of the ways in which meaning is created in performance. An understanding of performance theory as well as the conditions of performance can only benefit the student of writing drama, but solely in the context of a reconceived idea of what the dramatist does and in what the dramatic text consists.
The compleat dramatist
The idea that the dramatist is entirely responsible for the complete dramatic text is not a return to outdated concepts and assumptions.
9 Theatre Audiences (Routledge, 2003), p. 20. First published 1997.
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It is not an argument for just studying the play-on-the-page, or just seeing a drama as a quirky kind of novel manqué. In any case, a book about the art of writing drama must take account of the performance-related aspects of dramatic writing, while not allowing them to usurp writerly considerations.
But the argument that the dramatist produces a complete text these days seem to be an oddly radical-seeming challenge to the way in which both text and dramatist now largely carry an extended
‘minority’ status, with the dramatist marginalised. To reclaim the primacy of the written text for the dramatist is by no means too extreme a point of view. It is not an ideological battle for who controls the ‘meaning’ of the text (dramatic or performance), but rather a new and complex acknowledgement of the dramatist’s responsibility and a refusal to allow the performance industries or Performance Studies to colonise the power of the text for their own purposes.
The idea that the dramatic text is secondary has provoked pockets of resistance. Appeals for the rehabilitation of dramatist and text have come from different quarters, not merely, as might be expected, from dramatists themselves. During the 1970s playwright John Arden argued for an ‘eventual aim of re-establishing the Playwright in a useful and fulfilling role’.10 While himself part of the movement to politicise theatre, nevertheless he saw the dangers of attributing accusations of manipulation in the theatre to the
‘tyranny’ of the text: ‘the idea is allowed to evolve that the only way to save the theatre from its moribund state is to down-grade the script and to concentrate entirely upon the “vital” values of performance.’11
Looking back from the perspective of contemporary literary and cultural theory, Elinor Fuchs commented on the 1960s generation:
‘Never before . . . had the dramatic text been looked on as the enemy, rather than the vehicle, of theatrical presentations . . . many 10 To Present the Pretence (Eyre Methuen, 1977), p. 179.
11 Ibid., p. 188.
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theatres came to regard the author’s script as an element of political oppression in the theatrical process . . .’12 For her, precisely as the result of the greater understanding afforded to performance, ‘The text comes out from the wings as a separated theatrical element . . .’13
There is a dialectically more complex and accurate way of understanding the relation between the dramatic text and dramatic performance, which is concealed when the same word – ‘text’ – is applied to each. While a ‘text’ in its postmodern connotations clearly refers to an object to which an identifiable system of literary signification can be applied, it has conspired to blur what is otherwise a clear point of departure for dramatic writing and to imply a competition between different ‘texts’ for primacy. It is, of course, a competition for authorship – particularly of meaning; as if the academic could usurp the worldly attribution of authorship to the individual dramatist.
In fact, of course, the text never went away, just as the conceit of the Death of the Author never abolished either authorship or textual responsibility. The power and importance of postmodern theories still dominate academic study and are still being worked through.
However, even during the period in which they developed, there were other ideological positions.
An incisive comment from Terry Eagleton returns us neatly to a way of approaching the relative autonomy of the dramatic text and of the dramatist’s role: ‘A dramatic performance is clearly more than a “reflection” of the dramatic text; on the contrary . . . it is a transformation of the text into a unique product, which involves reworking it in accordance with the specific demands and conditions of theatrical performance . . . what has intervened . . . is a transformative labour.’14
This approach seeks to establish the ways in which the dramatic and
performance ‘texts’ can coexist and still retain autonomy. This 12 The Death of Character (Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 70.
13 Ibid., p. 91.
14 Marxism and Literary Criticism (Methuen, 1976), p. 51.
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can enable us to plot the relationship between texts, and produces a synthesis between the contradictory historic argument that an understanding of performance is secondary to the written text and the postmodern attempt to reduce the written text to what is virtually a by-product of performance. It is on this basis that a realistic prospect of teaching the art of writing drama becomes possible.
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2 The emergence of the dramatist and
drama in education
While writing drama may be a relative latecomer to today’s academic creative writing boom, it had an important role to play in the history of Creative Writing (CW) in America. When English literature was first established as a university subject at the end of the nineteenth century, studies of Composition in the English language accompanied it. In the US, writing instruction is still compulsory for first-year American college students.
D. G. Myers, the main historian of CW in the US, has summarised the trajectory of its development:
The story of creative writing began with the opposition to philology and resumes with the effort in the 1880s and 1890s to restore literary and educational value to the teaching of rhetoric . . . English composition was the first widely successful attempt to offer instruction in writing in English . . . it was formulated at Harvard in the last quarter of the century out of a constructivist belief that the ideal end of the study of literature is the making of literature . . . English composition established the autonomy of college writing and created a demand for courses in writing from a literary and constructivist point of view. And these were necessary preconditions of creative writing’s acceptance as a subject of serious study . . . Until about the 1920s, though, there was small need for creative writing per
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se because English composition and creative writing were one and the same thing.’1
It is interesting that, in some pioneering universities, playwriting was an important presence even at this early stage. At Harvard, George Pierce Baker set up an advanced course called ‘The Technique of the Drama’ in 1906. He had taught a similar course the previous year at Radcliffe, a women-only college. In 1919 he published Dramatic Technique, based on a series of lectures originally delivered in 1913.2 He claimed that learning to write drama constituted a valid university subject in its own right and demanded its own pedagogic approaches. The fact that it ‘has had for centuries in England and elsewhere a fecund history before the novel took shape at all would intimate that the drama is a different and independent art from that of the novel and short story’.3 Baker was not the only pioneer. The Carnegie Institute of Technology set up an undergraduate drama programme in 1914 and the first graduate programme was started at Yale in 1926.
When English literature was established in British universities, also across the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, there was one very important difference: the study of composition did not become a part of its curricular development. This meant that the principle of writing instruction has never been an intrinsic part of university English Studies in the UK, and for this reason (and other culture-specific ones) creative writing arrived much later in higher education in this country –
indeed, formally not until after World War Two. Nevertheless, on both sides of the Atlantic the revival of professional high-art theatre at the end of the nineteenth century proved significant.
The emergence of the fully professional writer in the UK dates from this time, covering different genres – journalism, scholarship, 1 The Elephants Teach (Prentice-Hall, 1996), p. 36–37.
2 Da Capo, 1976.
3 Ibid., p. 5.
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the novel, poetry and drama. In a passionate, campaigning book, The Pen and the Book,4 published in 1899, Walter Besant warned professional writers against the rapacious demands of publishers, defended the respectability of the professional writer, provided down-to-earth advice about contracts, described the difficulty of the
‘Literary Life’, and outlined the differences between writing poetry, prose fiction and drama. Aware of the ‘great increase in the number of theatres’ in London,5 he predicted, indeed, that the drama would take over from the novel: ‘In fifty years’ time the English imagination will, perhaps, assume instinctively a dramatic form, as it now assumes the form of fiction: there will be two or three hundred theatres in London and its suburbs.’6
Besant, one of the founders of the Society of Authors in the 1880s, himself wrote in all genres. William Archer, on the other hand, while not himself a dramatist, confirmed a demand for textbooks ‘on the art and craft of drama . . . It is not so with the novel. Popular as is that form of literature, guides to novel-writing, if they exist at all, are comparatively rare.’7 Archer was a theatre reviewer and translator, and was instrumental in helping to bring Ibsen’s plays to the London stage.
Besant’s and Archer’s books accompanied a wave of socially aware new drama, strongly influenced by European companies, many of which visited London: ‘The eighteen-nineties witnessed the emergence of independent theatre movements in a number of European cities. Antoine’s Théâtre Libre in Paris, the Freie Bühne in Berlin, the Independent Theatre in London, the Abbey in Dublin, the Moscow Art Theatre, proclaimed a new faith in the drama’s integrity and social function.’8
4 Thomas Burleigh, 1899.
5 Ibid., p. 107.
6 Ibid., p. 114.
7 Play-making: a manual of craftsmanship (Dodo Press reprint, originally published 1912), p. 1.
8 Theory and Technique of Playwriting by John Howard Lawson (Putnam’s, 1949), p. 83.
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Antoine’s ‘Théâtre Libre’ was a subscription society, founded in 1887 for new drama; the Moscow Art Theatre was founded in 1898, notably producing the plays of Anton Chekhov. As a result of visits from these companies during the 1880s and 1890s, J. T. Grein founded the Independent Theatre Society, in London in 1891. This was a subscription society, ‘giving occasional performances of serious new drama, unhampered by the constraints of official censorship and commercial accountability.’9 They put on the first English production of Ibsen’s Ghosts in 1891 and presented plays by George Bernard Shaw: ‘The Independent Theatre produced twenty-eight plays in seven years, and together with the Stage Society, which succeeded it in 1899, was responsible for establishing what Matthew Arnold called an “ethical drama” . . .’10 Renewed interest in reviving the theatre of the past accompanied these developments: actor-manager William Poel set up the Elizabethan Stage Society in 1894, ‘for the purpose of presenting Shakespeare uncut, without scene changes, and on stages corresponding to the Tudor originals’.11
These entrepreneurial moves generated a rapid increase in new drama and in the emergence, not only of the dramatist as a distinct and (sometimes) respected professional, but also of the modern director. As Edward Braun has pointed out, even before this time, someone always had overall responsibility for the ‘production’. In Shakespeare’s time it might have been the dramatist, later it was actor-playwrights such as Molière, or actor-managers such as Garrick and Poel. Constantin Stanislavsky ‘became Russia’s first stage-director in the true sense of the word’, in 1890.12 In the English theatre, Harley Granville-Barker, who was also a playwright, staged plays by Ibsen in the early years of the twentieth century, encouraging indigenous new work. By this time 9 Th
e Director and the Stage by Edward Braun (Methuen, 1983), p. 77.
10 Ibid., pp. 77–8.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., p. 60.
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playwrights such as John Galsworthy, John Masefield and George Bernard Shaw were becoming, according to Braun, box-office attractions in their own right.
Besant and Archer recognised that this new interest in theatre constituted an important cultural force. Enthusiasm was high: ‘In the forty years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War the English theatre reached a new level of popularity and commercial success. Between 1880 and 1900 fourteen new theatres opened in London alone, and many existing ones were completely renovated. With their extravagantly gilded and plush upholstered interiors and with the previously uncomfortable pit benches replaced by high-priced orchestra stalls, a night at the theatre acquired a new decorum and sense of occasion, which precisely matched the opulent respectability of the affluent middle-class of Victorian England.’13
Drama and education
The idea that drama could be a means to an end accompanied the incorporation of English literature into schools and adult education.
The adult education movement has been of great importance in this country; during most of the nineteenth century English literature was more widely taught in classes run by the University Extension Movement than it was at universities. Even before Oxford and Cambridge formally adopted English as part of their degree courses, these popular tutorial classes were being extensively taught by campaigners for the ‘subject’ to be accepted at universities. In this context Shakespeare’s plays had a dual function: as a study of poetry on the page, and as part of the practical, authenticist revival of theatre production undertaken by Poel and others.
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